Tag Archives: Joseph Campbell

The Importance of Context in Myth Interpretation

Flowers, Lummi Island, WA. Photo by Scarlett Messenger
Flowers, Lummi Island, WA. Photo by Scarlett Messenger

The Importance of Context in Myth Interpretation

When I originally wrote this ISP, I had to come to terms with the fact that I had no idea what I was doing. I had never written an ISP before, and trying to design a curriculum around a subject you want to explore is rife with assumptions and conjecture about what you think you will learn and how the different materials will coordinate. When I planned on writing this essay, I assumed I would have reached a point where I would have something meaningful to contribute to this subject. Instead, I find myself asking even more questions than before. I feel that instead of a traditional essay, what I really need to do here is discuss my observations and consider the context of my sources. There are themes, biases, and concepts emerging that I had not expected to see, and I find the more I think about the backgrounds and intentions of the writers, the more I am understanding the framework that is being imposed on what is actually a far more nebulous construct than we believe.

Nothing is absolute or concrete in the world of the hero/heroine. Archetypes are represented in in a myriad of characters like reflections in a shattered funhouse mirror, and steps in the journey become conflated or are missing altogether. The journey is not a check list, rather a constellation of elements that contribute to an understanding of the phenomena. Like a good recipe for stew, it is the recognizable end result that makes it stew, not a set list of ingredients. Figures like the Herald are represented in Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit (Carroll 25), but finding one in Aschenputtel (Tatar 113) requires some serious bending of the archetype to fit. To think of the journey strictly in terms of the stages prescribed by Campbell in Hero With a Thousand Faces is to impose a dogmatic structure onto something that doe not have one. What we are dealing with instead is a series of common features. These are the hallmarks of what humans tend to view as the heroic journey, and their sequence and meaning are completely open to interpretation.

Another consideration that needs to be made is the context of the interpretation. Each of the three books I have chosen come from different writers, writing from different backgrounds and even different time periods. Unlike “hard science”, mythography and analysis is admittedly steeped in cultural bias and personal interpretation. Part of the purpose of myth is that a story’s interpretation is what binds a people together. We are all like the blind men touching the elephant. We all see what we want to see based on our limited understanding of what the story is telling us. In Tarsem Singh’s film The Fall, a hospitalized American stuntman in the early 20th century tells a very American story of bandits, escaped slaves, and Indians to a little Romanian girl. The story is visually portrayed from the little girl’s point of view, and it takes the viewer a moment to realize that the child is envisioning the tale through the filter of her Old World upbringing, imagining the “Indian” of the story to be a Hindu mystic and the endless sands of the Sahara taking the place of the sagebrush desert of the American West. This gives the viewer a unique perspective on how the same tale can evolve through not only the filter of the teller but the filter of the listener. That is the nature of myth and folklore. It is the skeleton that we all hang our own skins upon in order to see ourselves better.

Campbell’s filter comes from a place very inspired by Freud and Jung, with a dash of world religion tossed in. Campbell’s work was very influential on the New Age movement, as it provided a framework in which we could all view our own lives against the epic backdrop of the hero’s quest. The role of women in American society was decidedly different at the time this book was written, and although he attempts to interject heroine stories into the discussion, his primary focus is on the journey of what was viewed as the hero of his age: the virile, Post-War man who strives for mastery over himself and all he surveys. While these values are not necessarily contrary to the truth of a woman’s motives in her journey, in the narrative of myth and fairy tale the stories are likewise filtered through the context of their time and place. It is also critical to note that many who knew Campbell personally attested to his possessing a very bigoted and misogynistic world view outside of his academic studies (Larsen 510). Because of the deeply personal nature of myth interpretation, it is difficult to imagine that these personal opinions would not have had an influence on his writing. In spite of his reputation as being the definitive word on the subject, Campbell’s protagonists do not exist in a vacuum of white, male privilege. There are other viewpoints to be heard.

Women Who Run With the Wolves, on the other hand, is written by a woman in the latter half of the 20th century. Estes was a Jungian therapist who specialized in victims of abuse, disaster, and war with PTSD. She herself had a difficult early life, and her female heroine clearly has a combat-ready stance (Pinkola Estés). She portrays the heroine as a woman who has found harmony with her primal nature and is unafraid to snarl. As a poet, Estes is far less interested in narrative and more fascinated with symbols and connections. Many of the tales she discusses in her book were not stories I could find referenced elsewhere, and may either be her own creations or reworkings of older stories. Estes book was written during the tail-end of the Second-Wave Feminist movement based on the experiences of a woman who had seen women transition from the strangling domesticity of Campbell’s Post-War America with only 29.6% of the workforce being women to 45.2% by 1990 (Toosi 24). Wolves came at a time when women were becoming competitors for resources in the public realm in unprecedented numbers. Her call for women to see themselves as predator rather than prey was both timely and inspiring.

The Heroine’s Journey is a horse of a different color. Murdock is a family therapist, and as such her focus is on concepts of identity and inner cohesion rather than Campbell’s metaphysical narrative and Estes’ call to arms. Murdock is contemporaneous with Estes, and the emphasis on the feminist experience is present in both, but Murdock describes a heroine whose duality is a conflict between masculine and feminine rather than beast and woman. At their core, both arguments would seem to bolster each other, but Murdock’s take has a more intimate spin. The Heroine rejects the feminine, which she associates with the perceived weakness of her mother. Instead she embraces the masculinity of her father, which she considers the key to strength and success. This practice of taking the heroine and making her little more than a man with breasts is frequently seen in many of Hollywood’s more misguided attempts at producing what has been codified as “Strong Female Characters”. Because society has come to associate masculinity with strength and heroism, we must make our heroines conform to the masculine ideal of adventure, or a pale, cliché “woman as nurturer” variant that feels safe for our sensibilities. We are given attractive young women in skin-tight catsuits, tailor-made to appeal to the male gaze (Pennell, Behm-Morawitz 212), roundhouse kicking their way through throngs of bad guys rather than anything that attempts to show what truly motivates a woman to take on the heroic journey. Murdock’s description of this process of rejecting the feminine as inherently weak came at a time in our history when women were beginning to emulate more masculine modes of dress and behavior to prove their worth. To create a vision of strength in our heroine, we have to strip her of the perceived frivolity of femininity and inject her with machismo.

When Murdock states that the heroine struggles against the weakness of the mother, one cannot help but wonder if this weakness is something innate to the mother-figure or society’s filter veiling our eyes. The film Star Wars is a prime example of how the rejection of the feminine mother-figure as weak is tightly woven into our perception of the heroine. The fact that Princess Leia is rarely mentioned as a heroine and plays a secondary role to her brother Luke Skywalker does her a disservice. Leia is a freedom fighter motivated by compassion for her people. She is tortured in the line of duty, and yet manages to maintain her composure even as she watches her entire planet obliterated by the Empire. Sadly, Leia’s fearlessness and willingness to risk her life for the good of humanity is overshadowed by memories of her in a brass bikini. She is a galactic mother bear, but we have reduced her to Jabba’s sex slave, Han’s girlfriend, and Luke’s sister. We minimize the heroine because she is often a creature that reacts rather than seeks. The hero may take on adventure for adventure’s sake, for conquest, or in defense of his people, but the heroine is seen through the scrim of what are considered “feminine drives”. When Campbell dismisses the exclusion of heroines from his book as being because “…women were too busy; they had too damn much to do to sit around thinking about stories.” (Campbell 145) it is because he didn’t consider the stories that women were participating in, namely fairy tales, as being important enough to study. Because in a male-centered culture, being willing to stand up to the beast that is trying to steal the loved ones from your arms is not seen as a show of strength, hunting and slaying a dragon is.

There is a reason why we consider the Disney Princesses princesses rather than heroines, even though many of them are. We don’t see Cinderella (Tatar 113) as heroic because all she did was have a good heart and wear a pretty dress. However Cinderella survived horrible abuse, rejection, and deprivation for years and managed to come out of the situation with her good heart in tact. We view her has having no agency, no power, and as little more than arm candy. Perhaps our drive to contextualize her against the masculine expectation that one must slay the dragon rather than survive it does a disservice to the core of feminism. Empowerment is not emulating the masculine, it is finding your own strengths and using them. Cinderella is not a dragon slayer, and she knows this about herself. Rather she is as a Zen monk, patiently waiting for her kindness to pay off, coping with an untenable situation until divine intervention rewards her patience. We see her as victim because of her enslavement, but ignore her triumph in retaining her humanity and mercy in the face of oppression. Thought provoking, however this line of thought leads down the rabbit hole of questions about how we define the heroine and if the context of Campbell’s hero is even relevant to her journey.


At the end of the first half of this ISP, I find I have to ask myself new questions. How concrete are these stages of the journey? Are there actual differences between the hero and the heroine? Must a heroine always be a fighter, or can she succeed in her journey in other ways? We think that the model for the heroine has changed over the years because of feminism, but have we just slapped new packaging on the same, old product? Most importantly, how does the context of the the mythographer change the perception of the myth, and how does the context of the listener or viewer interpret this? Clearly, there is more reading needed. I have been making every effort to incorporate other sources and opinions, as I don’t feel this course of study to be complete without as broad a spectrum as possible. By the end of this course, I hope to have a better picture of how all of these elements and world views coalesce into a more unified version of the heroine.

Bibliography

Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Sigourney Weaver. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1979. DVD.

Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Sigourney Weaver. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1986. DVD.

Apuleius, and Erich Neumann. Amor and Psyche; the Psychic Development of the Feminine; a Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius. New York: Pantheon, 1956. Print.

Baum, L. Frank, W. W. Denslow, and Michael Patrick. Hearn. The Annotated Wizard of Oz: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Norton, 2000. Print.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Knopf, 1976. Print.

Campbell, Joseph, and David Kudler. Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004. Print.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972. Print.

Carroll, Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner, and John Tenniel. The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. New York: C.N. Potter, 1960. Print.

The Cell. Dir. Tarsem Singh. Perf. Jennifer Lopez. New Line Cinema, 2000. DVD.

Coraline. Dir. Henry Selick. By Neil Gaiman. Perf. Dakota Fanning. Focus Features, 2009. DVD.

The Descent. Dir. Neil Marshall. Perf. Shauna McDonald. Celador Films, 2006. DVD.

Dogma. Dir. Kevin Smith. Perf. Linda Fiorentino. Cinema Club, 1999. DVD.

Dundes, Lauren. “Disney’s Modern Heroine Pocahontas: Revealing Age-old Gender Stereotypes and Role Discontinuity under a Façade of Liberation.” The Social Science Journal 38.3 (2001): 353-65. Web.

Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine, 1992. Print.

Fields, Donna Lee. “Rhymes with ‘Bitch ’: The Real Heroine of Fairy Tales.” EHumanista 26 (2014): 264-86. Web.

Grimm, Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm, and Maria Tatar. The Annotated Brothers Grimm. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Print.

Labyrinth. Dir. Jim Henson. Perf. Jennifer Connelly. Henson Associates/Lucasfilm, 1986. DVD.

Larsen, Stephen, and Robin Larsen. A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Print.

Legend. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Mia Sara. Embassy International Pictures, 1985. DVD.

MirrorMask. Dir. Dave McKean. Perf. Stephanie Leonidas. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1990. Print.

Murdock, Maureen. “Meet Maureen Murdock.” Maureen Murdock. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.

Palumbo, Donald. “The Monomyth in James Cameron’s The Terminator: Sarah as Monomythic Heroine.” J Popular Culture The Journal of Popular Culture 41.3 (2008): 413-27. Web.

Pennell, Hillary, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. “The Empowering (Super) Heroine? The Effects of Sexualized Female Characters in Superhero Films on Women.” Sex Roles 72.5-6 (2015): 211-20. Web.

Pinkola Estés, Clarissa. “Biography.” Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.

Star Wars. Dir. George Lucas. Perf. Carrie Fisher. Twentieth-Century Fox Corp., 1977. DVD.

Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987. Print.

Toosi, Mitra. “A Century of Change: The U.S. Labor Force, 1950–2050.” Monthly Labor Review May (2002): 15-28. Print.

V for Vendetta. Dir. Andy Wachowski. By Lana Wachowski. Perf. Natalie Portman. Warner Bros., 2005.

Williams, Christy. “Who’s Wicked Now? The Stepmother as Fairy-Tale Heroine.” Marvels & Tales 24.2 (2010): 255-71. Web.

The Call to Adventure/Separation from the Mother

Baker Preserve, Lummi Island, WA. Photo by Scarlett Messenger
Baker Preserve, Lummi Island, WA. Photo by Scarlett Messenger

The Call to Adventure/Separation from the Mother

For this ISP, I deliberately selected two books that I have been meaning to read but never gotten around to it. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell and Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I have read excerpts from them for various classes, but this is the first time I have sat down and read the books in their entirety. In addition I am reading The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock, at the behest of my sponsor. Since this is my first ISP, and every adventure has a beginning, that is where I am starting: the beginning of each book discussing how adventures begin.

What is different about the path of the heroine and the hero? Campbell’s work discusses the journey from an almost exclusively male point of view. In fact, in the first two chapters, female characters are primarily described in the section discussing the refusal of adventure. He speaks of the hero in terms of his inner, Freudian-inspired motives and drives. Estes, rather than specifically discussing the beginning of adventure, chooses to use the archetype of La Loba, or Wolf Woman, as the actual source of the call. Murdock takes the issue in yet another direction by emphasizing separation from the mother and reconciliation with the concept of the feminine as the critical first step. For Campbell, the mythologist, the call comes from the spiritual world. For Estes, the Jungian analyst, the call comes from archetype within, from the collective unconsciousness we share. For Murdock, also a Jungian psychotherapist, she finds the answer in the personal dynamic between the heroine and society’s expectations placed on women.

Campbell mentions The Herald, a figure who’s job it is to call the hero to his destiny and initiate the journey. This figure is often portrayed as grotesque or feared. Estes La Loba is certainly a fearsome figure, described as the Bone Woman who raises the dead, a feral and earthy creature. The Herald of the heroine’s journey seems to manifest in a friendlier but no less anxious way. We can see a different example of The Herald in The White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland. Although few would argue that the bunny is grotesque, his preoccupation with time, authority, and death at the hands of the Queen certainly makes him a awesome figure for the adolescent Alice. He is Adulthood, he has obligations, his time is limited. Her decision to follow him is not reckless, it is her decision to heed the call of her own curiosity in spite her fears. Similarly, Toto from the Wizard of Oz is another Herald, although again of a far less frightening countenance than La Loba. In the film version of the tale, he is the reason Dorothy is caught outside in the tornado that carries her to Oz, and her motherly concern for his safety is the impetus for many different plot points in the journey. Toto is her child, another glimpse of impeding Adulthood leading her onward. Neither The White Rabbit nor Toto provides any guidance or advice as to how their heroines should proceed. While they share similarities, The Herald should not be confused with The Guide, which we will be discussing later in this class. The Herald’s only job is to beckon, not to inform. In some cases, the Herald will share the duties of the Guide, but they are not the same role.

This week’s films were Kevin Smith’s comedy Dogma and The Wachowski’s dystopian V for Vendetta. In both films, the heroine is called to service for a greater cause. In Dogma, the heroine Bethany is informed by The Metatron (voice of God, who appears as a pillar of flame initially, before douses him with a fire extinguisher, revealing him to be Alan Rickman) that she is the Last Scion, or descendant of Christ, and is the only one who can stop the apocalyptic actions of a pair of fallen angels, thus saving the world. She naturally refuses such a dangerous and terrifying responsibility, as most people would. She states that she is not worthy of such a task, due to her loss of faith over being incapable of having children. The Metatron informs her that she needs to put her resentments aside, as she is being offered the chance to become mother and protector to the entire world instead. Bethany eventually relents and sets off to New Jersey, which is where most apocalypses take place. But this act is what differentiates the hero/heroine from the rest of us. It isn’t bravery, strength, or magic powers. It is the willingness to follow The Herald, even if you aren’t certain of what lies ahead.

In V for Vendetta, the heroine Evey is pressed into service against a tyrannical British police state by a masked man who seems almost inhuman in his combat abilities and tolerance for pain. For the first half of the film, she refuses to do little more than the bare minimum to help his cause, although she expresses sympathy with his beliefs. She openly claims her fear, says she wishes she could be strong but she isn’t. After the masked man orchestrates her staged imprisonment and torture, she discovers the fortitude within herself to transcend her fear and follow The Herald. Although the movie is primarily concerned with her transformation into the heroine, her future trajectory as the heroine is implied by her actions as she takes place of the masked man after his death.

Interestingly, all of these women share something that Murdock alludes to in her book: the Absent Mother. Dorothy, Evey, and Bethany are orphans. Alice’s mother is unknown, and in fact a text search of the online version of the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reveals not a single reference to the word “mother”. These are all girls on the cusp of puberty who have been separated from the mother, for better or for worse, and are on their way to discovering themselves as the future women they will become. This is, at least in part, at the core of the heroine’s journey: who will you be when you finally have to stand on your own?

In each of these examples, the heroine is called by The Herald to address an injustice (although in Alice’s case, her confrontation with the Queen is less motivated by the urging of others as it is her own impatience with the bully and self-preservation.) Her fear and reluctance may or may not be a clearly stated issue, but in the end she realizes she has to confront that fear to protect the weak and disenfranchised. She might refuse the call with an “it ain’t me” moment, like Evey and Bethany, before heeding The Herald. She might go willingly toward adventure out of curiosity and boredom with society’s restrictions on young girls, like Alice. She might go out of love and concern, like Dorothy. In the end, however, in order for us to have a journey, she has to put aside her fear and say yes to The Herald.

References

Smith, K. (Director). (1999). Dogma [Motion picture on DVD]. London: Cinema Club.

V for vendetta [Motion picture on DVD]. (2005). USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.

Baum, L. F., Denslow, W. W., & Hearn, M. P. (2000). The annotated Wizard of Oz: The wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Norton.

Carroll, L., Carroll, L., Gardner, M., & Tenniel, J. (1960). The annotated Alice: Alice’s adventures in Wonderland & Through the looking glass. New York: C.N. Potter.

Campbell, J. (1972). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Murdock, M. (1990). The heroine’s journey. Boston, MA: Shambhala.

Estés, C. P. (1992). Women who run with the wolves: Myths and stories of the wild woman archetype. New York: Ballantine Books.